In stark contrast to the aftermath of Roumain's death in 1944, Alexis's 1961 demise did not provoke general outpourings of grief in Haitian intellectual circles. There was no Jean Brierre to declare, as he had done at Roumain's funeral, that the man was dead but “The God is still ours,” no René Depestre to cry, as he had done of Roumain, that the death of Alexis “left behind an army of orphans.” Indeed, Alexis's contemporary, the poet Lucien Lemoine would write in 1965 that “I did not like Jacques Alexis. I think he was superior to me in many different ways, but I would not want to be like him.”

Like Lemoine, Depestre seems to have been largely unmoved by Alexis's death, however much he was shaken by the violence of his former comrade's demise. It is significant that Depestre did not dedicate a poem to Alexis until “Nouveau poème de ma patrie enchaînée” in the 1976 collection Poète à Cuba. Four years previously Depestre had begun to address Alexis and his legacy in his preface to the Cuban edition of Compère Général Soleil. This essay presents a mixed and contradictory image of Alexis, and Depestre admits that “it is not easy to trace a realistic portrait” of his elusive subject.